a master's degree in human services is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #104 out of 343 on popularity of all such degrees in the nation. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 2 schools in the Southwest Region to determine which ones were the best for human services students pursuing a master's degree. Combined, these schools handed out 44 master's degrees in human services to qualified students.
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DEBUG: Checking offer "Social Work & Social Sciences Bachelors Programs (I Have a HS Diploma or Associate Degree)" with relevance 0.9
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DEBUG: relevant_offers count = 7
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Early-Career Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of master's graduates during the early years of their career. That is, everyone wants their master's degree to be worth something, and salaries are one measure of determining that.
Other Factors We Consider
In addition to the above, you should consider some of the following factors:
Major Focus - How much a school focuses on human services students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other human services students want to attend this school to pursue a master's degree.
Educational Resources - The amount of money and other resources allocated to students while they are pursuing their degree. These resources include such things as number of students per instructor and education expenditures per student.
Student Debt - How much debt human services students go into to obtain their master's degree and how well they are able to pay back that debt.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized human services related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for human services students working on their master's degree.
The human services school you choose to invest your time and money in matters. To help you make the decision that is right for you, we've developed a number of major-specific rankings, including this list of the Best Human Services Master's Degree Schools in the Southwest Region.
DEBUG: Raw major_slug = "social-services-public-administration//human-services"
East Central University is a wonderful decision for individuals pursuing a master's degree in human services. Located in the remote town of Ada, ECU is a public university with a small student population.
Students who graduate with their master's from the human services program report average early career income of $43,213.
The bars on the spread charts above show the distribution of the schools on this list +/- one standard deviation from the mean.
The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a branch of the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) serves as the core of the rest of our data about colleges.
Some other college data, including much of the graduate earnings data, comes from the U.S. Department of Education’s (College Scorecard).
by our College Data Analytics Team
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